Naqada I Settlements (4000-3500 BC)

Elite Tombs. A principal physical difference between the Badarian and the Naqada I periods, at least at the cross-over period about 4000 BC, is that Naqada I finds include "white cross-lined painted pottery." Why does this matter? White cross-lines are nice, especially if you have been spending a lot of time looking at pottery without them, but they hardly constitute a world-shattering difference.

What the white cross-lining often depicted has sometimes been debated, but most scholars now agree that the designs, if representational, may be intended to show boats engaged in river trade. Already in Badarian sites there are ideas and products that are not local, so some commerce must have occurred, even though we know little about it. But the Naqada I materials suggest a good deal of commerce up and down the river, even in the absence of any central government to protect it from the thieving and unscrupulous. If the crossed lines indeed do represent this trade, the fact that it has become part of a decorative motif found on grave goods suggests an increase in its relevance to people.

The presence of extensive trade, if that is what the white cross-lined painted pottery is really about, makes us sit up and take notice for another reason beyond simply its increased scale, especially if distant trade is involved.

First, rare goods from afar can become symbols of status difference.

Second, trade and the development and maintenance of social classes seem to appear together in the archaeological record in most of the world.

And third, the appearance of social class seems to be a precondition for the development of early states.

White cross-lines don't matter to us; trade does, and the Naqada I adaptation seems to have involved a lot of it, or anyway a lot more than the earlier, Badarian adaptation did. The white cross-lines suggest that they recognized how central trade could be.

Powerfacts. With Naqada I, the elaboration already characteristic of Badarian tombs gets more elaborate yet. Naqada I tombs have more materials and more elaborate ones, and, unlike Badarians, Naqada I people built not only "elite" tombs, but whole "elite" districts in their cemeteries. Perhaps most interesting, they produced what some archaeologists have called "powerfacts," objects intended as symbols of one's social position. A typical powerfact is a tool or weapon made of precious materials too fragile or too clumsy for actual use, but intended only (or almost only) for display.

In the case of the Naqada I elite, we see beautifully produced mace heads of rare stone, a kind of object made as symbols of royal power in later centuries. [Note 9]

Near the Naqada I cemetery at Nekhen a kiln was been found that was used to produce a kind of "powerfactual" pottery: "Plum Red Ware," apparently intended only for use in elite burials. Indeed, Nekhen seems to have been a major production center for such materials. Also found at Nekhen was a locally made mace head made of porphyry. It was apparently intended for luxury display, since porphyry is a luxury material, a fine-grained igneous matrix containing large and conspicuous feldspar crystals.

Pottery Barons and the Funeral Business. The late Michael Alan Hoffman, the excavator of Nekhen and perhaps the leading specialist on predynastic Egypt, surmised that a trading system seems to have existed by which elite people elsewhere "imported" expensive ceramics for their tombs from Nekhen, creating a profitable business in producing and distributing such wares, which "rich" people throughout a wide area used as symbols of their elite status. Indeed, it is possible that once the system got going, the very fact that an object came from Nekhen may have conferred on it an intangible value added in addition to its inherent worth.